When Envy of None released its self-titled debut album two years ago, Alex Lifeson was loath to acknowledge it as a band.
And now — with a follow-up, Stygian Wavz, coming on March 28 — he confesses that wasn't an accident.
"I always said this is a musical project with four musicians. It's not really a band," Lifeson tells Guitar Player via Zoom, seated in front of a wall of guitars in his home studio in Toronto. "But when I got the masters back and I heard the sequenced tracks all finished, I thought, Omigod — we're a band!'
“This is more than a little project with a bunch of people. This is unified. This sounds like a band. That is the impression I think this record gives, and that's the big difference between the first one and the second one."
Lifeson can be forgiven for his tentative view of Envy of None, of course. After nearly 47 active years in Rush, and the crushing death of drummer Neil Peart during January of 2020, one can understand his hesitation to embrace the idea of a full band again.
"Maybe I held back a bit," Lifeson notes. "I didn't want to be in another band. I was already in one band my whole life, and I wasn't ready to be in another band. I always think of a band as this unit that goes out and travels and works and plays live and all that — maybe that was the difference.
"But now I'm saying that we function as a band and we think conceptually as a band, and I don't feel that conflict anymore."
And Lifeson is correct to consider Stygian Wavz as a more complete band expression than its predecessor.
Envy of None is actually the fusion of two musical endeavors linked to former Coney Hatch bassist Andy Curran. He and Lifeson began working "casually" on new music shortly after Rush's 2015 farewell tour, without a stated purpose. Two instrumental tracks, "Kabul Blues" and "Spy Horse," were released via Lifeson's web site to help promote a new signature Les Paul Standard for Epiphone.
At the same time, however, Curran met Portland, Oregon vocalist and songwriter Maiah Wynne, who won a Zoom mentorship session with Curran through a music contest. He soon brought her into the fold with Lifeson as well as guitarist/keyboardist Alfio Annibalini.
"When I heard Maiah's voice on the first material, I could hear her voice on all the material that we were working on," Lifeson recalls. "I just knew there was something that was really strong there.
“Then it shifted gears. It was no longer a casual project of working on a few songs for a possible EP. It became an album project, and we wanted to make it meatier in that sense."
The group released Envy of None album and the subsequent 2023 EP That Was Then without touring, in a bid to tamp down expectations. Lifeson says work began on Stygian Wavz almost immediately after the first one,” and the growth he felt in the group was exponential.
"It brought us closer together as musical unit," he says. "I love the first album, but this one is more solid to me. Maia matured so much in these last couple of years as a singer, as a songwriter, as a lyricist — all of those things. I have so much respect for her musical energy and the way she writes and the way she thinks, and as a singer — omigod — she's just blossomed.
"She's become my muse. the two of us have a particular relationship in this band where we send stuff back and forth constantly, and we're constantly updating, tweaking, because something one of us does will inspire the other to go to the next step. That's a great way to work."
Lifeson, in fact, sounds particularly unbound on Stygian Wavz’ nine tracks, driving the fat groove rock of the opening "Not Dead Yet," exploring Middle Eastern textures in the title track, building textured layers in "Raindrops," playfully dropping a reference to the Beatles' "Day Tripper" into "Thrill of the Chase" and lacing hot solos throughout the album. He is decidedly more present here, immediately identifiable at time (the solo on "The Story," for instance), and at other times pushes himself in fresh directions.
"I think on the first record I didn't want to be show-offy, so there weren't very many solos," Lifeson explains. "I think I tried to create a guitar presence that was sort of an anti-guitar presence, almost like the guitar was sounding like a completely different instrument, which was challenging and fun for me to do, definitely.
"But I think on this one I felt more confident I could stretch out as a guitarist. There are solos on this record. I'd been kind of moving away from soloing — I don't know why, 'cause I think I'm a decent soloist and I love playing solos. And my mentality in constructing solos is it's all in service of the song; I want to make the solo not some flashy, crazy thing, but something that speaks to the songs. And with this music being so cinematic and ambient, it gave me so much more room to do that.
"So I guess, in a way, I bloomed on this record. I let myself go a little more which is a good thing, 'cause I tend to hold back and be tentative with a lot of things. And on this record I just let go, and there was a new confidence and I had a better, clearer picture of what we wanted to create as a band."
Lifeson certainly has the tools to do that with, and he's happy to show them as he pivots the Zoom camera around to show what's in the "pretty good toolbox" arrayed around him.
There are, of course, the custom electric guitars that bear his name, like his signature Les Paul Axcess as well as the Les Pauls and ES-335s he's been playing since the early days of Rush, and the Godin's Lerxst acoustic models. Some PRS, Fender Telecasters and a Rickenbacker 12-string are also in the mix, as well as "my myriad of acoustics" — Loucins, Martins, Ovations and Gibsons among them — that could fill a small music shop in their own right. A Godin oud makes an appearance on Stygian Wavz’ title track.
Where it gets really interesting, Lifeson notes, is in the realm of effects and amplification — much of which sits to his left in the studio.
"I have all my analog compressors and my beautiful Neves — the 1173s and some other Neves," he says. A Mesa/Boogie Mark V head and a single, 12-inch Celestion cabinet were "primary" for his sound on the new album, while he gushes about his signature IK Multimedia TONEX and Universal Audio pedals.
"They sound amazing," Lifeson says. "They don't sound like plug-ins; they sound like real amps. They've managed to nail the bottom end that was always lacking with plug-ins and really get what an amp sounds like through a speaker cabinet. It's a whole new generation in sound. There's nothing lacking."
And, he adds, there's no shortage of possibilities within this "toolbox." "I like the trial and error part a lot," he says, casting a fond look at the gear pile. "I enhanced the experience with a little cannabis, usually, and I then spend hours going through this gear, because it's so much fun to experiment and hear these things and mess around. That's where I came from, and to this day — at my age, sixty-eleven, if better — I still like to explore all that stuff.
"So it's not ever boring. It's maybe a little time consuming — time-wasting, sometimes — but it's all part of the fun of being a musician and playing in a band."
At this juncture the four Envy of None members have only been in the same room a handful of times, according to Lifeson, but the band talks about playing live "all the time. We would love to do it. In our minds we see the gig in a nice, comfortable, small theater with a nice light show and two albums of really cinematic, trippy, atmospheric music. It would be fantastic."
Economics, of course, play a part in any decision, and even though Lifeson remembers that Rush lost money during its first four years of touring there's no such appetite to repeat that with Envy of None.
"So we're gonna wait," he says. “If the record takes off and does well, and if there's interest there from promoters, maybe we could work something out. It would be awesome."
In the meantime Lifeson says Envy of None will start thinking about album three. One song from the Stygian Wavz session was started but "put on the back burner" as the album was being finished, and while there's no other material around yet he's confident more is in the offing.
"We work like we're in a pyramid; we keep going back and forth until we put the top cap on, and then we know we're done," Lifeson explains. "The last time Maia was here we talked about all kinds of things that we wanted to accomplish, but she likes to work independently, like me, no one else in the room. It's difficult to focus on something if you've got people around you telling you what their ideas are, too, and Maia's the same about how she works. So we'll go back to our own spaces and start to come up with ideas and build from there."
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